Competitive Analysis: How to Become an SEO Hero in 4 Steps

The practice of SEO is a fairly results oriented business. Increasingly, metrics dominate the focus of the SEO professional, whether rank, traffic, or conversions. While a move to more measurement is overall a good thing, it means that SEO professionals are increasingly head down, focused on the things – like link building , on-page optimization, and content creation – that they believe will move the metrics needle. A byproduct of a focus on tactics that can be closely tied to metrics is that activities that are perceived to not produce an immediate impact are often left undone. One example of just such an activity is competitive analysis . Some SEOs don’t do it at all, either for the reasons described above, or because their thinking goes: It doesn’t matter who my competitors are or what they are doing, I’m just going to focus on moving my keywords up the rankings . Other...